Cormac McCarthy

Suttree
$15.00
Ernest Hemingway believed that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Puffin Classics).

In a foreword to that novel Twain wrote that, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

With Suttree, Cormac McCarthy hues to this tradition and delivers a modern day Huckleberry Finn.

There is no motive in Suttree as the characters meander from day to day concerned primarily with eking out an existence on the margins of society in the South of the 1950's in the river town of Knoxville, Tennessee.

There is no moral in Suttree. Despite the generally benevolent disposition of the main character, Cornelius Suttree, the novel and its characters are best described as amoral. There are scenes of vicious and senseless violence, but despite their graphic depiction they are not gratuitous. Rather these violent episodes bespeak a gruesome reality that was commonplace in our not too distant past and still exists out there on the margins.

Finally, there is no plot in Suttree. The novel is a string of loosely connected but largely isolated episodes populated by prostitutes, petty thieves, and prairie preachers occurring over several years in Suttree's life. Suttree spends time in a juvenile detention center, he ventures upriver to harvest pearls with a huckster and his family, he even wanders off Christ like into the wilderness of the Smoky Mountains for a spell. But mostly Suttree wanders through life haunted by his past, unworried about the future, and determined to make it on his own in his self imposed exile from society.

What there is in Suttree are beautifully written meditations on the utterly mundane and banal routines and rituals that comprise our lives. Suttree exists purely in the moment, and through McCarthy's exquisite prose so too can the reader. Perhaps, unlike Huckleberry Finn, there is a moral to Suttree after all.

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library)
$22.95
I'm sorry, but I don't understand all the high praise that people give this novel. For me, it's little more than a Spaghetti Western written in arty prose, some of the prose impressive (McCarthy is very good on landscape and corpses) but most of it just arty. There are no characters, no recognizable human beings who turn into cold-blooded killers (which could give the material the moral weight many attribute to it). No, it's only presences, silhouettes with names (the Kid, the Judge, the Captain), the shadows of character types we already know from movies, without any actors to flesh them out. I'm not a big fan of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, but boy did I miss him here. Now and then the book gets beyond the formula pleasures of a Sergio Leone movie to achieve the nightmare surrealism of EL TOPO, but I don't find that a good work of art either. Reading this book is akin to watching a great Western like THE WILD BUNCH while roaring drunk: you can pick up the gist of the story through your elation, but you lose all details and emotion and human reality. You can't even be sure what happens at the end.

The Crossing
$15.00
Billy Parhman captures a shewolf on his property. Instead of shooting it, he promptly decides to return it to Mexico. What follows is an odyssey of pain and laughter, sorrow and triumph, and all those other literary nouns people like to use to make a book sound important. In this case, of course, they all fit.

This is, of course, a Cormac McCarthy novel, and so this book is not going to pander to the reader--it's complex and dense, and like all of McCarthy's westerns, large chunks of dialogue are in Spanish. That's part of the joy in reading McCarthy--it's a tough, rigorous experience, but you come out the richer (if more depressed). What caught me off-guard is the humor here; there was some in BLOOD MERIDIAN and ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, but for the most part McCarthy's work is bleak and depressing; THE CROSSING had some laugh-out-loud dialogue, and even more that I could somewhat understand thanks to my four years of Spanish in high school. But make no mistake: the humor is a byproduct here, as is everything; McCarthy always remains true to his environment and his characters, which means that if someone has to die when you don't want them to, they're going to die. That may or may not be a spoiler here; read the book to see. THE CROSSING isn't McCarthy's best (I'd vouch for BLOOD MERIDIAN, and I wouldn't complain if someone said THE ROAD), but it's still a fascinating exploration of humanity...which yes, means a close, hard look at the bleak side of life. McCarthy doesn't lie: he only offers hope when there is some. And for Billy Parham, hope is a hard thing to find.

The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Everyman's Library)
$36.00
There is little to add to the other positive reviews, but I would compare McCarthy's writing style to impressionist artists; broad, accurate and simple strokes that allow the reader to form the images within their own experience; in this respect, it is prose at its finest. In my opinion it is rivaled only by Raymond Chandler's depiction of pre-war/noir Los Angeles. The Border Trilogy is my first exposure to McCarthy. I intend to read everything he has written.